General Body Meeting
A series of workshops in the context of Sarai Reader 09: Exhibition
Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India

It’s my pleasure to invite you to join me in a series of small collective exercises which I will hold at Sarai between the 30th of January and 2nd February.

During the meetings, we will be working with material from my research into the revolutions of 89 in Eastern Europe. In particular, we will be working with a ten minute scene from the first meeting of the East German Central Round Table (revolutionary council) in December 1989, where procedure is disrupted by the shouting and whistling of a large group of demonstrators approaching down the street. For a few minutes, until the demonstration passes, the different political groupings inside the room struggle to position themselves vis à vis the revolutionary masses outside – relating to them both as threat and political sovereign. While language and the formal procedures of the political institution seem to foreclose the possibility of acting collectively, the bodily tensions, movements, gestures, facial expressions, physical intensities visible in the footage attest to a non-verbal, bodily level on which the totality of the revolutionary experience still persists.

In our meetings at Sarai / Devi we will focus on this physical, gestural content of the video:

What is the role of the body in revolution? Is the body itself a disruptive force that can open up spaces of rupture/ openness in the political status quo? And what forms of resonance between such vastly diverging political contexts as the East Germany of 1989 and present-day India can such an approach invite?

Drawing also on different artistic forms of re-enactment, and of working with bodies more generally, we will engage in an open collective experimentation to produce a number of small interactions, as well as discussing the issues and materials at hand.

The workshops/ meetings are open to all. Please contact me for further info or to sign up. Looking forward!

Just got back from the Banff Centre in Canada, where I took part in the residency “La Commune. Die Bühne. The Asylum” with Althea Thauberger and had a wonderful and very productive time completing a couple of new projects. More on those coming very soon.

228 artists and cultural producers from Berlin signed an open letter to Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit in response to his plans for an “Achievement Show of Young Berlin Art” which it takes as a basis for addressing some of the pertinent problems with the cultural politics of Berlin in more general terms.

I am currently showing my installation Our Brief Autumn of Utopia at „Vectors of the Possible“ at BAK, Utrecht, which opened last week. The installation consists of the video/sound piece May I Interrupt (2009), which some of you may have seen last year, and a new video and collection of materials, Reading the Constitution.

I was happy to contribute material from my work on the Central Round Table of the GDR to two workshops this year, the Workshop “Der Zentrale Runde Tisch” at Shedhalle, Zurich, 13/24 July 2010 and “Der Vorstand konstituiert sich/ The Board Constitutes Itself” at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck. Thanks to Inga Zimprich and Sönke Hallmann for the invitations.

An open workshop using excerpts from the transcripts of the meetings of the Round Table of the GDR, which are collectively read, re-worked, questioned and partially performed. Can this process of an interrupted reading, of discussing excerpts in a cold reading, of performing an impromptu rehearsal, open the space of potentiality that was closed in the processes of institutionalisation and closure that accompanied the production and later the historization of these documents?

The workshop at Shedhalle was followed by a talk with Sophia Bickhardt who described and contextualised the practice of the Round Tables speaking both as historian and protagonist / participant of the Round Table in Leipzig.

Developed with Inga Zimprich and Sönke Hallmann for the exhibition „Versammlung/ Assembly“, Shedhalle Zürich
23 / 24 July 2010